CTA: Ventra glitches mostly gone but delays remain

December 04, 2013|By Jon Hilkevitch | Tribune reporter

(Jose M. Osorio/ Chicago Tribune)

Four months into the CTA's new fare-collection system, Ventra customers are still wasting too much time tapping their transit cards and waiting for the "Go" signal to pay on buses and continuing to face delays in getting help from the Ventra call-in center, the transit agency reported Wednesday.

The good news is that software glitches have mostly been resolved on the rail system, CTA officials said.

"Confusing turnstile delays that sometimes led to denied entry or a second charge from double-tapping have largely vanished from the rail system in the weeks following software upgrades" by the Ventra contractor, Cubic Transportation Systems Inc., the CTA said in a statement.

On the rail system, 99.8 percent of more than 5 million transactions were processed in less than 2.5 seconds, with an average speed of 0.6 seconds, from Nov. 18 to Dec. 1, following software upgrades, the CTA said.

Cubic's $454 million contract with the CTA requires an average fare processing speed of 0.5 seconds.

One of Cubic's primary focuses now is improving fare-collection performance on the bus fleet, where customers say they often experience malfunctions with Ventra readers that result in multiple attempts to pay fares and bus drivers waving commuters aboard for free.

The CTA said Cubic expects to complete Ventra software upgrades on buses this week. The company previously said the bus software patches would be completed last week.

CTA president Forrest Claypool said in early November that Cubic has not been paid and won't be until three major performance measures are met: Lowering average call wait times to Ventra customer service of five minutes or less to speak to an operator; all Ventra readers must process taps in 2.5 seconds or less, 99 percent of the time; and vending machines and card readers on both buses and at rail stations must function 99 percent of the time.

Once those criteria are achieved, Cubic is pressing the CTA to start paying the company $2.5 million a month, or $30 million annually, for the next 10 years.

A top Cubic official, Matt Cole, recently told the Tribune that Cubic expects to meet the requirements by year's end, triggering the start of payment from CTA.

Claypool would not commit Wednesday on a date to deactivate the old legacy fare system consisting of magnetic stripe cards and Chicago Cards. The original date was Dec. 15.

"There is much more work still to be done (on Ventra)," Claypool told the Regional Transportation Authority board.

Claypool indicated he feels no pressure to meet Cubic's goal of a full transition to Ventra by the end of this month. "In light of the issues we've seen, we want to take it day by day, week by week," he said.

In its Ventra update, the CTA reported that Ventra cards are being used on more than 66 percent of CTA rides, and more than 1 million Ventra accounts have been set up since the system was introduced in late August.

Wait times at the Ventra call center are averaging less than 5 minutes and overall call volume declined 17 percent in November from October, the CTA said.

But customers still say in many cases they don't get their problems handled and instead are told to wait for a callback, sometimes a day or two later, from a Ventra representative.